


Fisher King

by ConstanceComment



Series: Narrative Terms [2]
Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Childhood Friends, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Intrigue, Jossed, M/M, Mad Science, Multi, Mythology References, Nostalgia, Partial Mind Control, Sleep Deprivation, Soul Bond, Time Skips, Trust Kink, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-13
Updated: 2015-09-13
Packaged: 2018-04-20 13:43:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4789385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConstanceComment/pseuds/ConstanceComment
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You need to wake up,” Gil says. The last time Gil smiled at him like that, soft and tired, <i>trusting</i>, they were children.</p><p>Tarvek hadn’t even known he was asleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fisher King

**Author's Note:**

> The child abuse warning is due to Tarvek's upbringing, which is vaguely referenced, and what's going on with Gil currently in canon.

“Hey, Sturmvoraus,” Gil says. There are shadows under his eyes, and he looks— broken, around the edges. Behind his head, Tarvek sees the faint outline of thorns, like Ogglespoon used to trap the king and keep the princess safe.

“You need to wake up,” Gil says. The last time Gil smiled at him like that, soft and tired, _trusting_ , they were children.

Tarvek hadn’t even known he was asleep.

* * *

Mechanicsburg was never meant to be silent. Not meant to be still. The battle for the city hangs motionless, suspended in a thick, nearly solid mass of time, tinged pink, as if all the blood that filled the air and streets had frozen and diffused.

Of course, it’s only _like_ that; Tarvek can see the streams of red running across the ground, sees at a glance who will die when Mechanicsburg comes alive again.

“We had to tunnel to you,” Gil explains, tying off the bandage around Tarvek’s chest where the knife had struck him. Gil’s hair is messier than normal; it’s been two years ( _nearly three!_ ) and he looks as if he hasn’t slept at all since the clocks stopped in Mechanicsburg.

“And your father?” Tarvek asks. The Baron was there, he remembers. The pain of a poisoned knife in his heart; Tweedle’s smug, awful face; the Baron’s anger; Agatha—

Gil’s face closes in, lines drawn. He points, with a hooked thumb, to his own neck, pulling his starched collar down.

There’s a choker there, silver and thick, the band nearly too large for the icon. It’s a Wulfenbach symbol on the clasp, but Tarvek still recognizes the design— if he weren’t used to atrocity, he’d be sick.

“My father made sure he’d still have his agents,” Gil says, and Tarvek’s fingers itch to pull his collar up, or to hold him close.

Power and control — and never any of it his. When he was younger, Tarvek used wonder: how much do they have to lose before the world gives something back? He’s older now, and Gil is older still. The answer is everything, they could (will) lose everything, and never see it back.

* * *

“Where’s Agatha?” Tarvek asks, eventually. He’s been on the airship and treated for poison for two hours and not seen her, and been awake for twice as long.

This time, it’s a grimace from Gil, not mistakable for anything else. (And since when did Gil leave himself this open, show unguarded emotion— failure is infinite until bounded by death, and Tarvek has never had so much to lose)

“Not sure,” Gil says. “Better that way. It’s not— this isn’t as thorough as hers is,” he explains, pointing to his collar, pulled up around his neck once more. “It helps, but it’s not a fix all the time. And he’s—” a tightening of the grimace, Gil twisting his face. “We’re integrated,” he says, and— “you always did say I was going to turn into my father.”

Around them, people move, deferential to Gil, suspicious of Tarvek. Castle Wulfenbach is the same as it was hours ago (years ago) and still different. The halls are emptier, but the staff he sees are still frantic, thinned by two years of war.

Gil reflects his holdings in every way. Tarvek remembers the stories an English student once told in these halls, when the castle had been a school: the curse of the fisher king, who had built a cauldron to resurrect the dead and give perfect knowledge, wounded by a spark-work spear, such that the very land itself was sick with his pain. The land was barren, so the king’s people starved, and he starved as well, sick on the pain of his land, guarding the grail they protected even so near his own death, holding the spear that had slain him as his walking stick. Defiant to the last, holding fast to holy ground because it was _his_ , because he was relied on.

Tarvek is not worthy of a grail; he is no knight. But he’s never cared, really, about what he deserves, and only what he’s needed, wanted. If the Baron could reverse engineer Lucrezia’s beacon, Tarvek knows he can do the same to Agatha’s locket. Agatha herself, he thinks, has already laid the groundwork for him; he can recognize her hand around Gil’s neck— who else would Gil let collar him like that?

“We’re going to see her again,” Tarvek says, and the look Gil gives him is knowing, like he understands the promise.

* * *

Over the course of the day, it’s nothing but motion. Thin staff or not, there’s always a crisis, always a ship returning from the front, from the interior— from the edges of the realm. Gil is always on his feet, providing medical care for the wounded as they report, directing troop movements even as he stalks through the halls to keep the great airship (and the empire itself) flying.

Tarvek helps where he can, makes suggestions, shadows Gil and keeps an eye out for assassins, the machinations of his own kin. In twenty four hours, he stops two kill strikes by heading them off at the pass, a word in the right untrusting ear enough to root out the more unsubtle agents against the empire.

Gil catches the third by himself, slamming the table he’s working on to lever it up into the arc of a thrown grenade, then kicking the piece of furniture back into his assailant, pinning the man into a wall.

And it would be fine, but when Gil brings his foot down, he stumbles, stance broken for a fraction a second just long enough to scream unforgivable _vulnerability_ to anyone smart enough to look.

Gil’s aides are competent. They see to the remains of the man not fragmented by his own euclidean grenade, salvaging what can be salvaged, saving the bits of his head that could be used for interrogation. But competent is all Tarvek can say for them— Gil’s going to die, like this. Maybe not tomorrow, or next month, but in a year, maybe eight months, he’ll be nothing but a dead upstart, abandoned in the wreckage of his father’s illegitimate works.

“You need to sleep,” Tarvek tells him, once they’re alone again, a full day and a half after Tarvek first woke.

They’re in a maintenance shaft, now, Gil repairing internal processes that Tarvek makes note of without paying undue attention to. Tarvek has realized, already, that this is as close to rest as Gil allows himself; busy work for non-idle hands, make work for the sake of making work, because there always is work. He’s stripped down to his undershirt, stiff-collared coat of office abandoned in the cramped heat, matching Tarvek’s own state of relative undress. The silver choker on his neck is unguarded, shining in the dim light.

Gil snorts from around the screwdriver in his teeth. “You can’t tell me what to do, Sturmvoraus,” he says, dropping the tool into his hands so he can fiddle with the ventilation system.

In the little space, Tarvek watches him work, and feels like screaming: Gil droops, as his hands move without him, mannerisms unlike him but _close_ , facial expressions not Gil’s but _close_.

There was a version of the fisher king’s story, that Tarvek found in the castle library years ago, where the king died of his injuries in a foreign field, and his followers carried his still-speaking head for 80 years on his orders to return him to his lands. Baron Wulfenbach is a usurper in all things, Tarvek knows; of titles, of holdings, of empires never his to command. But to see him reach into his _own son_ and use him as a hostage—

“Why, because you’re older now?” Tarvek drawls, twisting a pair of now braided wires into place. Gil doesn’t answer, busy with his hands. “Or because you’re so incompetent you couldn’t even train your subordinates to keep things running for eight hours without you?”

With only a few inches of space between them in the cramped innards of the airship, Tarvek can feel Gil bristle.

“Makes sense,” Tarvek continues, carefully idle, screwing the panel he was fixing back into place. “You’ve never been good with interpersonal relations; and you really never were that competent to begin with— I’d just assumed two years could make a difference,” Tarvek shrugs. “Some causes are just lost, I suppose.”

“Get wound,” Gil hisses, and Tarvek grins, nasty and smug and every ugly thing he knows how to be.

“Most people, when handed an empire, find ways not to be second rate at that, but I’m not surprised—”

Gil whirls on him, a coin-precise turn even in the tiny, heated space, slamming into Tarvek, both hands around his neck. “I should’ve _left you there_ —” Gil snarls, eyes dilated in the dim light, the curve to his spine entirely his own. “Why in god’s name do you have to be so _infuriating_ —”

“It was easier for Agatha to grab hold, when she was angry,” Tarvek says, and Gil’s hands twitch around his throat. Measuring pulse rate on someone as well-trained as Tarvek in order to ferret out a lie is useless, but if Gil cares, Tarvek’s heartbeat is steady. Something considering falls into his eyes; if Gil had a free hand, he’d be putting it to his chin, but he seems happy with the grip he has.

“Are you going to make me clean this up for you, too?” Tarvek asks, and Gil snarls again, shoving at Tarvek with a fraction of his strength.

“Good,” Tarvek says, and lets his smile stay nasty, get sharper. “Hold on to that. Whatever you have to hold onto, and don’t let go for a second.”

“What do you think I’ve been doing?” Gill asks. “Making a holiday of it?”

“I think you’ve been doing everything at once,” Tarvek retorts. “I think you’ve been squandering your resources in the _worst conceivable way_ , because of _course_ you have to do it all by yourself, of _course_ you can’t rely on the people _you’ve been training yourself_ , who are _battle tested_ , to do the work you assigned them.”

“You’re going to ruin yourself like this,” Tarvek tells him, and pulls his hands up to where Gil’s are still wrapped around Tarvek’s neck. “Either you’re going to slip, or worse, _he_ is, and considering it was your father’s shit planning that got us here, I don’t trust him to get us out.”

“Your father’s plans, as well,” Gil points out, and Tarvek nods, because the truth is what it is.

“His plans weren’t even his,” Tarvek agrees. “But that’s it— we have to be _better _. _You_ have to be better. And that means you need to sleep, Gil, you can’t do this without something breaking—”__

“I don’t remember the last time you said my name,” Gil remarks quietly, and the admission stills both of them, the air in the crawlspace heavy, nostalgic, thick with the ghosts of the last time they hid here from their responsibilities.

“I’m not calling you Wulfenbach when that could refer to either of you in there,” Tarvek says, and the block in his throat is thick, old.

Gil grimaces, and pulls his hands back from Tarvek’s throat. “Fair,” he says, and even the six inches of distance between them is suddenly more than Tarvek can bear.

“If I take you out to your quarters,” Tarek says, “someone’s only going to come get you, aren’t they?”

“Likely so,” Gil agrees.

“Then stay here,” Tarvek suggests. “It’s sequestered in here, and I can watch the exit easy enough.”

“Are you telling me to sleep in a crawlspace?” Gil asks, one eyebrow rising, incredulous.

“I’m sure you’ve slept in worse places,” Tarvek says. “Considering the rumors, and the time they found you passed out in that—”

“—Right,” Gil cuts him off, chagrined.

Tarvek raises an eyebrow himself. “I’m serious about this, you know.”

Gil shakes his head. “You’re _unhinged_ , is what you are.”

“Madboy,” Tarvek says, and gestures to Gil’s discarded jacket. “You can sleep on that,” he says, and turns out of the space, bending to fit through the access hatch.

He can feel Gil’s eyes on him as he goes, but Tarvek does not turn.

In the hall he stands, and recalls the layout of the operations table from that morning. Troop movements take time, after all, and he intends to be here for eight hours, at least.

Adrenaline, nonepinephrine, and serotonin, he thinks, for Gil and Agatha. His machines were never solely organic; Tarvek prefers systems of organisms, or living machines, but he’s more than capable with biology.

* * *

“Sturmvoraus?” A voice dimly remembered from the streets of Paris, and more recently from Tarvek's escape from the castle asks, a few approximate hours into his watch.

Tarvek doesn’t turn in the voice's direction, or answer, just forces himself to jump in an approximation of fear when a knife embeds itself in the wall by his head despite the awkward angle of the throw.

“Captain DuPree,” he says, and allows her to push him, shoving into his space.

“First things first— I don’t trust you,” she says, her face uncomfortably close to his own, the unmistakable point of a wickedly sharp knife pressed against his belly.

Tarvek pulls up a smile, something bitter he smoothes the edges out of as best he can. A wrinkled vest is better than nothing— a sword’s not a death ray, but he can use it all the same. “Most people don’t,” Tarvek tells her. “Which I find to be _completely unreasonable_ , by the way, considering all the lengths I’ve gone to—”

“Shut up,” DuPree hisses. She’s a lot like Gil, Tarvek thinks, in the way she resorts to physical violence so quickly. But then, she was (is) the Baron’s red right hand; Tarvek’s not sure he’d expect her to be otherwise. “If you hurt him,” she tells Tarvek, one hand fisted in his shirt, the other still holding the knife, “you’ll fall for days before the ground finds you.”

“Is there a method behind that threat, or do you just intend to get inventive about it?” Tarvek asks her.

“Who says it’s not both?” DuPree asks with a smile. “I’m always game for finding new fun. So understand me on this, weasel boy: I don’t know _why_ , but he trusts you. He tunneled through a fucking time stop to get to you, and he hasn’t even seriously tried to remove his father yet. He trusts the Heterodyne girl, too, even if she is just as nailed down as he is, inside. And she trusts _you_ , or at least, she trusts you to fix this.”

DuPree fixes him with a look. “He’s either told you, or you’re smart enough to figure out what’s going on with him on your own. He fixed you. So fix him,” she says. “Or grow wings.”

Agatha trusts him. She trusts him with Gil, with putting this all back together—

“Why not both?” Tarvek asks DuPree. “This place is a deathtrap either way.”

DuPree laughs, vicious and startled. “Have his back, Sturmvoraus, or find a knife in yours. And I’d have a lot of fun chasing you down, I can feel it.”

When she leaves, Tarvek sits down on the ground, back pressed up against the wall he hopes Gil is still sleeping behind. He feels the vibrations of the ship, and remembers childhood, all the helpless, awful futility of it.

There’s nothing in this world that anyone can keep, if they’re not prepared to kill for it with their own two hands. Sometimes not even that is enough.

Tarvek is still going to try. That’s all he’s ever had.

* * *

The smart thing to do would be to flee the castle, and rally his own forces, get them out from under the Queen of the Dawn, or whatever it is that Lucrezia (or equally as likely, and as worryingly, Zola) is calling herself these days. The Baron’s empire is crumbling; _Tarvek knows all his battle plans for the next month_ , having been let back into the war room like no time at all had passed since the siege. Meanwhile, the Heterodyne’s days are ending, Agatha scattered and regrouping after her own adventure through displaced time. Tarvek could rule, with a landscape like this before him. Be the Storm King in title and holding and the _right_ of it, and not the third side of an alliance that isn’t even _real_ yet, that might never be.

But Tarvek— a promise never meant anything to him, until they tried to keep one to him.

Here’s what Tarvek remembers from the _Si Vales Valeo_ : being isolated, and alone, from three different, identical perspectives. And, suddenly, the idea, the _reality_ of never being alone again.

It was yesterday, for Tarvek, that the three of them were together in a way that he thinks whatever’s left of his soul will be crying out with the loss of for the rest of his life. If he closes his eyes, he can still feel the echoes of _knowing_ two other people, and being known, even if the specifics are lost to him.

If you are well, I am well.

Tarvek honestly thinks it’d be easier to live without his lungs, now, than to choose to be without them.

 _All of it, mine, ours, mine._ Every word Agatha said was that, at the end, compromises worthless to her even under siege if they meant she couldn’t have her cake and eat it too. Tarvek doesn’t have to fight Gil and Agatha’s way to fight their way— he just has to _fight_.

* * *

“What time is it?” Gil asks when he emerges, hours later, from the ventilation shaft.

“I have no idea,” Tarvek tells him honestly, “my watch stopped when the bomb went off,” he can’t help smiling, the stupid, frightened, helpless laughter that spills out of him sick and giddy.

Gil squints at him, desperate concern nearly naked under faint, familiar suspicion.

“When’s the last time you slept?” Gil asks him.

Tarvek shrugs, leaning his head back against the wall, eyes closed. “Two days, I think? But it was for two years,” he says. “I’m sure I can fit a few more days under my belt before I have to go down again.”

“I’m not going to disappear on you,” Gil tells him, that same soft, quiet thing in his voice that pulled Tarvek out of slumber.

Tarvek shakes his head. “You have before,” he says, and the admission is— blue fire, he really has been awake too long.

“I won’t,” Gil says firmly, _promises_.

Slowly, Tarvek breathes out, and pulls his tired feet under himself. A hand is at his elbow by the time he’s fully standing, Gil pressed into his shoulder.

“I’m assuming you’ll want an actual bed,” Gil remarks, and Tarvek huffs in response.

“If you think I’d be happy to sleep on the floor like you, the degenerate that you are, you’re sorely mistaken.”

Gil rolls his eyes, and Tarvek notes the bruises still beneath them, the lines that have spawned, in the blink of perception, on Gil’s face.

The room Gil guides him to, Tarvek realizes, is Gil’s very own. Not the Baron’s quarters, but his room, the space they built for themselves in the castle’s early days, when the children sent to live there had near-free run of a half-built masterwork, empty corners enough for two lonely boys to build a whole sanctuary. Tarvek recognizes it by its placing in the ship, the familiar series of turns his feet had memorized that take them there.

Difference is, there’s a door, now, to the room instead of having to crawl through vents only big enough for children. It’s secret enough still, Tarvek supposes, since they get in through a locked false hatch in supply closet via several traps that Gil disarms with practiced ease, but it’s still a _door_ , still somewhere Gil had come back to.

“I built a bed in here after my breakthrough,” Gil says, as if Tarvek isn’t staring, openly, at the character of the place, the knick-knacks on the walls, the fishing pole from their cistern adventures propped on a shelf near the low-hanging ceiling. As if he isn’t thinking about, still, a Gil who kept this place and still sleeps best in crawlspaces with his back guarded, trying to fit that into his worldview.

“It’s comfortable enough,” Gil continues, “though not, I’m sure, anything close to what you’re used to.”

“I won’t be able to sleep on a threadcount any lower than 300 silk,” Tarvek demands faintly.

“Not on your life,” Gil tells him. “But I can knock you out, if that’d help. You’ve had it coming, anyway.”

“I’ll manage,” Tarvek says, but he can’t stop _staring_.

Next to him, Gil fidgets, or something that in Gil _is_ a fidget, a rebalancing of his weight that is entirely unnecessary given how deeply combat-ready the oaf is. Propping himself up against the wall next to the head of the bed, Gil slides down, until he is seated with a clear view of the door.

“Give me your watch,” Gil demands, and Tarvek squints at him before turning it over, the hands inside unmoving.

Tarvek sits down on the bed, finding the thing little more than a lab cot with a comforter thrown over it. Carefully, he removes his shoes, and lies down.

Below and next to him, Gil unfolds his screwdriver into a multitool, and pries open the reinforced glass cover of Tarvek’s watch. “Go to sleep,” he says, and his brow furrows, concentration and focus coming more naturally than Tarvek’s seen him access either in two days.

Tarvek sleeps. Following him down, the faint sound of watch gears, clicking, sticking before they turn, in orderly beats, the noise of tinkering steady and real.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this all in one night, and the sun is rising as I post this. My insomnia's hit me full-force recently after a bad week and a particularly hellish incident that's given me feelings all over again about Tavek's situation, as if I didn't need to identify with him _harder_. TL;DR — this probably has typos in it. I'll clean it up when I wake up, but I just wanted to get this done.
> 
> Of course Tarvek is such a romantic that he actually thinks of his problems with a heavy dose of literary metaphor and mythology. He tries not to be, but it's what he _is_ , under the scheming. Hell, even in the scheming itself.
> 
> The chemicals cited are all linked to anger and the 'adrenal' responses people have (chemically) to getting angry. Serotonin is also linked to focus, and sleep, as well as ADHD, which I've always identified as being part of the spark, from the scatteredness to the hyperfocus, as well as variable energy levels.


End file.
